05 March 2014

Where Do You Want to Go?

Things are changing, no doubt about it. All over the world. Like in every paradigm shift there are cities that move fast, cities that try to play catch up and cities that are still tying their shoelaces in the starting blocks.

One of the primary challenges that remains is the perception of who infrastructure is for. I meet many politicians and planners around the world who clearly think that they are expected to provide safe infrastructure for the few people riding bicycles in their city right now. They fail to understand that they should be building infrastructure for all the citizens who COULD be riding a bicycle if they felt safe on a complete network of infrastructure.

The Zeros to Heroes cities that are way ahead of the curve - for example Barcelona, Seville, Dublin, Bordeaux, Paris, Buenos Aires - have just rolled up their sleeves and built infrastructure. Infrastructure that actually reflects where the citizens want to go in a city. Which is basically the same as where everyone else wants to go.

In many other cities, bits and pieces of infrastructure are put in where it won't bother the motorised traffic too much. Often such bits and pieces are launched with much fanfare. "See! We are thinking about bicycles!" Even though the bits and pieces are symbolic gestures that do little to reestablish the bicycle as transport on the urban landscape. Here in 2014, after seven or eight years since the bicycle returned to the public consciousness, there are only 370 km of protected bicycle infrastructure in all of the United States, compared to 1000 km in Greater Copenhagen alone.

What I often see around the world is attempts by cities to put cyclists where they want them to ride, based on false assumptions that this is want cyclists also want. "Ooh, those cyclists must really want to ride on quiet roads, away from traffic.... yeah... that's what they want." Then follows symbolic routes following all the vague principles of detours.

Citizen Cyclists are sent out of the way of basically everywhere that city-dwellers want to go. Shops, businesses, restaurants, cafés, cinemas, workplaces. The existing, historical Desire Lines of a city - aka roads - remain the domain of automobiles.

While Copenhagen may be "all that" these days, mistakes have been made. Lessons have been learned. Back in the 1980s when citizens were returning to the bicycle thanks to the reestablishment of cycle tracks, the City learned a valuable lesson. Cyclists were following the busy streets to get to and from the city centre. Normal behaviour for homo sapiens.

The City decided that this couldn't possibly be what they wanted. They assume cycling citizens wanted quiet routes, even if it meant they would have to go a bit out of they way. They constructed a pilot project route roughly parallel to Nørrebrogade - along Guldbergsgade - that they were sure would please the cycling citizens.

It was a flop. A2Bism will dictate that people want to travel along the most direct Desire Line, regardless of transport form. To the City of Copenhagen's credit, they respected this simple anthropological desire and started building cycle tracks along the pre-existing Desire Routes - the main arteries leading the city centre.

The rest is history.

If you live in a car-dominated city you might be pleased with symbolic municipal gestures like "bicycle boulevards" or whatever they call them, or bits of narrow "bike lanes". You are, however, being handed the short end of the stick. Bicycle urbanism may be a phrase I coined but the principles have existed since cities first were formed. Best Practice is right there, for the taking. With a bit of balance you might be able to rest your weary bones on a two-legged chair. Definately better than no chair. But four-legged chairs are on the market. Demand them.

You have to put this in perspective. Copenhagen had a 30% bicycle mode share in 1990. Los had six-tenths of one-percent. Its a lot easier to get the populous to go along with taking away space from motor vehicles when 50 times more of them per capita ride bicycles daily.

Los Angeles has put in 151 miles (equivalent to 8.5% of the miles of arterial streets) of mostly standard 5-foot wide bike lanes next to parked cars in the last two fiscal years.

Bike lanes next to parked cars on busy streets does not sound like much of a step forward, but its the fastest way to acquire space for bicycles on a street in the U.S. Speed makes it easier to obtain this space while recovering from a recession when streets are less crowded with cars.

Once its acquired with stripes, then in theory this space could be moved to anywhere on the road at a later date and updated with higher quality.

A problem with strictly adhering to desire lines on main streets in a big U.S. city, which the LA 2010 bike plan does, is that you cannot take away motor vehicle lanes on all of those streets due to extremely strong resistance from some constituents. In fact, its a complete crap shoot which ones will be approved by each council member.

If you simply stick to the approximately 717 miles of desire lines on the LA bike plan, you'll end with far less mileage than that in the amount of time estimated to complete this goal. When you widen the horizon by being flexible enough to put bike lanes on any of the 1,800 miles of arterial streets, you're much more likely to reach the mileage goal. You'll also get useful usage data for those streets with bike lanes and much more adults cycling, both of which will build stronger support to get some of those desire lines that were turned down.

Its not as simple as simply rolling up your sleeves and installing the infrastructure wherever you want when 75% travel by car and only 1% by bicycle.

Getting enough lane width to install cycle tracks is also something that usually takes time on most streets that are near, or at motor vehicle capacity during peak hours. Significantly increasing the travel time for drivers is not something that can be done very often for an area in a short amount of time. There has to be an adjustment period for people to switch to riding bicycles and get used to taking more time to travel by car.

Have to agree with Hindman. It's easy to take shots like Copenhagenize does here, but the reality is far different. I do agree that the shortest, most direct route is often preferable, but trying to get the State or the feds in the U.S. to give up a lane for bicyclists along a heavily traveled four- or six-lane artery is too often a loser's game. Believe me, we've tried. Business owners and other groups who make piles of money from car owners and drivers can beat powerful politicians up in a NY minute, and when that happens, there will be progress made on bike lanes. Maybe if you have a large enough constituency on two wheels, you can eventually swing public opinion, but to do that requires incremental planning. And planning requires direction, funding, and a lot of dogged, tedious work. Please do your homework before you issue uninformed opinions that inflame other uninformed bicyclists.

Kilometres cycled by Copenhageners so far today

Copenhagenize.com is the blog of Copenhagenize Design Company. Online since 2007 and highlighting the cycling life in Copenhagen and around the world.

40 years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 41% of the population arriving at work or education do so on bicycles, from all over the Metro area. 55% of Copenhageners themselves use bicycles each day. They all use over 1000 km of bicycle lanes in Greater Copenhagen for their journeys. Copenhagenizing is possible anywhere.